Director of Guggenheim Retiring After 27 Years

By JOHN RUSSELL

Published: November 5, 1987

Thomas M. Messer, the director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and of its museums in New York and Venice for 27 years, has announced his retirement. He said yesterday that he had no specific plans, adding, ''But my 68th birthday is coming up and although, like most Aquarians, I tend to fall in love with institutions, I just want to look at myself and see what's left of Tom Messer.''

By far the longest-running incumbent among the directors of New York's major art museums, Mr. Messer took over the Guggenheim Museum in 1961, at a time when the viability as a working museum of Frank Lloyd Wright's spectacular building was still in question.

That question was resolved when it turned out under Mr. Messer's directorship that large temporary exhibitions of both painting and sculpture could sit perfectly well in the Guggenheim. It was a risk.

''When we gave the whole space to a loan show of sculptures from the Hirshhorn Museum in 1962, I was scared,'' Mr. Messer recalled. ''I half felt that this would be my last exhibition.'' But, then and thereafter, the building proved itself. ''It has been my greatest privilege,'' Mr. Messer said yesterday, ''to work with Frank Lloyd Wright for 27 years.''

During those years, the Guggenheim evolved radically from its original function as a museum of purely abstract art. Thanks in part to a curatorial staff that at one time or another has included Lawrence Alloway, Edward F. Fry, Angelica Rudenstine, Margit Rowell and the present deputy director, Diane Waldman, it became, in fact though not in name, New York's second museum of modern art. A European Accent

It has, moreover, a character of its own. ''The Guggenheim has European roots, and so have I,'' Mr. messer said. For this reason, the collection has European emphases in the period since World War II that are peculiar to itself.

Through his friendship with the late Justin K. Thannhauser, which began when Mr. Thannhauser overheard his neighbor, Mr. Messer, playing Beethoven sonatas, he was able over a number of years to negotiate the eventual gift to the museum of many of its most important works of late 19th- and early 20th-century art. Initially on permanent loan, the Thannhauser collection was housed from 1965 onward in the museum's Thannhauser wing.

In the mid-1960's Mr. Messer was encouraged by the late Harry F. Guggenheim, at that time president of the Guggenheim Foundation, to raise with Peggy Guggenheim the possibility that her very important collection of 20th-century art should one day be entrusted, on terms to be mutually agreed, to the Guggenheim Foundation.

As Peggy Guggenheim had for many years distanced herself from her family, and as she was being courted at the time by many another institution, this was a project that called both for diplomacy and for long patience. But after her collection had been shown at the museum in 1969, Peggy Guggenheim deeded it to the custody of the museum. After her death in 1979, both the collection and her house, the Palazzi Venier dei Leoni in Venice, were legally transferred to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. In 1980, Mr. Messer was appointed first director of the foundation. Leader of Drive for Addition

During the last five years, Mr. Messer has also directed the campaign for the proposed addition to the Guggenheim Museum. The new building, adjacent to and linked with the present one, was recently approved by the Board of Standards and Appeals after lengthy and sometimes bitter debate. It would add 23,240 square feet to the museum and make it possible to display works by Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, Klee, Mondrian, Brancusi and many later artists whose work has for years been in storage.

The news of Mr. Messer's wish to retire coincides with the weeklong celebrations, due to begin this Sunday, of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, whose first duty was to operate what was then called the Museum of Non-Objective Painting. From Nov. 13 through March 13, 1938, visitors to the present museum will find an exhibition called ''Fifty Years of Collecting: An Anniversary Selection,'' which for the first time display the permanent collection (including more than 40 works from the Peggy Guggenheim collection) throughout the entire building.

''Installation is the moment at which everything is tested - the works of art, yourself, the museum's policies,'' Mr. Messer said. ''Installation is central to the director's task. His potential relationship with great works of art is the greatest gift that can be made to a museum director. In my own case, Paul Klee, Jean Dubuffet and Joseph Beuys changed the definition of what it's all about.''

A search committee, headed by Peter Lawson-Johnston, grandson of Solomon R. Guggenheim and president of the foundation, has been set up to choose a new director, and Mr. Messer hopes to be at liberty by the middle of next summer.